Conventional web site construction tools operate on traditional operating system platforms and generate as output HTML (hyper text mark-up language) and Script Code (e.g., JavaScript). A browser draws a web page associated with the web site by interpreting the HTML and JavaScript Code. However, conventional mark-up and scripting languages include numerous inherent limitations. Conventional mark-up and scripting languages have not been designed for serious multimedia applications. They have almost no file handling ability and very little computational power. In addition, they are remarkably slow and inefficient.
As such it is virtually impossible to write a web publishing application in HTML and JavaScript. All conventional implementations must, and do, utilize a full-featured programming language, such as C++ or Visual Basic. Since the current popular browsers do not support these languages, by necessity, conventional web publishing applications run on platforms other than the World Wide Web (WWW) and its browsers. Therefore, at best, a conventional web publishing application can offer only a crude preview capability of what a real web page will look like.
Although C++ and Visual Basic are very capable languages, the conventional web publishing applications written in these languages are still necessarily limited by the limitations inherent in their form of output, which as described above is typically HTML and scripting code. As such, a conventional web publishing application written in one of these languages suffers from the severe performance problems inherent in these languages.
For example, HTML and JavaScript are incapable of reformatting text and scaling buttons or images dynamically. In addition, most conventional web publishing applications design a web page layout to fit into a 640 pixel wide screen. This means that the ability for higher resolution screens to display more data horizontally is lost. Since capability is wasted on the horizontal plane, unnecessary vertical scrolling may be required. Further, on higher output resolution devices (screens), unsightly extra white space or background may be prevalent.